Jean-François Vallée (Collège de Maisonneuve)
This is the story of a personal quest. A few years ago, as I was writing an article describing Marshall McLuhan as the first truly “electric” intellectual,[1] I discovered that “oracle of the electric age” [2] and the “first celebrity intellectual of the electronic age”[3] had not always been so “electrified.” This is, I hope, the last chapter of my ongoing investigation into the circumstances and sources of Marshall McLuhan’s electrical conversion.
In the beginning was electricity?
It was in 1966 that Life magazine consecrated Marshall McLuhan the “oracle of the electric age.” The next year, the Observer branded him “the electronic prophet.”[4] A quarter-century later, less than a decade after his death, the editorsof Wired magazine, the flagship magazine of the new electronic digital revolution, virtually canonized McLuhan by choosing him as their “patron saint.”[5]
These religious monikers may or may not be considered truly evocative of McLuhan. Indeed, as is well known by true McLuhanites, even though McLuhan was and often still is considered the icon, if not the guru, of our “post-Gutenberg” electric/electronic age, the extent to which this man of letters, raised and deeply rooted in literary and print culture, was a true apologist of the new electric culture is highly debatable, if not downright mistaken.
However, the insistent religiosity of these metaphors can put us on the path of another very intriguing and much less discussed issue: if McLuhan is to be considered, erroneously or not, as an oracle-prophet-saint of the electric/electronic era, it must mean that he himself had “seen the light” at some point in his life about the advent of this new age, that he had somehow converted—intellectually—to this electrical perspective on the history of human communication and culture.
What do we know about the pre-electrical McLuhan, the non-electrified Saul who was to become the new electric Paul?
From The Mechanical Bride to the electronic pride
There was indeed a pre-electrical McLuhan. In his first book, The Mechanical Bride, as in his many other published writings up to the mid-fifties, McLuhan still referred to contemporary mass media (including electronic media such as radio and television) with an as yet “non-electrified” terminology. He wrote, for example, of all these “new media” as “auditory and visual media” or even “mechanical media.”
Still in the 1954 article “New Media as Political Forms,” published in the third issue of Explorations, one finds McLuhan positioning electronic media such as radio and television in a relation of historical continuity with printing and mechanical media: “Why,” he writes, “should literate men bemoan the mechanization of speech and gesture (radio and television) when it is precisely the mechanization of writing that made this development possible?”[6]
Five years later, McLuhan had drastically inverted this perspective, postulating a fundamental break with the mechanistic universe. In a talk revealingly titled “Electronic Evolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media” given in 1959 at the American Association for Higher Education Conference in Chicago, he states that the “electronic age, which began with the telegraph,” is a “post-mechanical age.”[7]
Later, in Understanding Media, as in many other writings, McLuhan reaffirmed this new perspective, contradicting his earlier views even more explicitly: “By many analysts the electronic revolution has been regarded as a continuation of the process of the mechanization of mankind. Close inspection reveals quite a different character.”[8]
In fact, while reflecting back in 1959,McLuhan himselfrecognized that, like his purported mentor Innis,[9] he had originally not seen the chasm that separates the mechanical from the electric age. “I failed at that time,” he admits, “to see that we had already passed out of the mechanistic age into the electronic.”[10]
Hence, it is only in the late fifties that the words “electric” and “electronic”[11] come to replace, and even to oppose, the earlier mechanistic terminology in McLuhan’s work. This change was, of course, not only terminological: it signalled a radical shift in McLuhan’s historical understanding of media and the history of technology. This is the moment when the old Herbert Marshall McLuhan, professor of English, became the new Marshall McLuhan, oracle of the electric age. This is the McLuhan of The Gutenberg Galaxy, of Understanding Media and of The Media is the Massage. This is the McLuhan we know.
But at what point exactly did McLuhan convert to this new discontinuous view of the history of media and culture? And what accounts for this transformation that will affect his whole outlook on—and even his whole methodological approach to—the history and technologies of human communication?
Oddly enough, although biographers and commentators of McLuhan have regularly commented on McLuhan’s religious conversion from Methodism to Catholicism in 1937, no one,[12] it seems, has seriously explored and discussed this—perhaps too obvious?—intellectual conversion some twenty years later.
Of course, McLuhan’s biographers—Philip Marchand (1989), Terence Gordon (1997), Judith Fitzgerald (2001) and, more recently, Douglas Coupland (2010)—all devote due attention to the seminal period of the fifties: to the crucial influence of Joyce, Eliot, Pound and Lewis for one; to the defining intellectual encounters in Toronto with Innis, Carpenter, Dorothy Lee and many others within the Culture and Communication Seminar; to the attendant publication of the mythical periodical Explorations; to the launch of the crucially important Project in Understanding New Media; etc.
To my knowledge, however, none of these eminent and very thorough biographers hints at or even explicitly identifies the major turning point in McLuhan’s view of media history and human technology. Coupland comes closest when he writes that: “The late 1950s were probably the most intellectually electric period of Marshall’s life. New ideas crackled around his head like Tesla waves.”[13] This highly appropriate imagery does not, however, deal with the more tangible process of the electrification and transformation of Marshall McLuhan’s mind at the time.
The moment of (electrical) truth
So when exactly did this electrical paradigm shift happen? Did it come about as a gradual awakening over an extended period? Or was it the result of a sudden (electrical) epiphany?
At the time of the McLuhan 100th anniversary conference in Toronto in 2011,[14] I had narrowed down the possible time frame of this “conversion moment” to a period situated somewhere between 1955 and 1957. Through some additional research, I have now narrowed it down to a period of only two or three months.
To my knowledge, McLuhan’s first, still tentative use of electric terminology in a published work is made in reference to James Joyce, in an article published in the June 1955 issue of the journal Explorations:
The simplest way to get at Joyce’s technique is to consider the principle of the electronic tube [….] Metaphor has always had the character of the cathode circuit and the human ear has always been a grid, mesh [….] But Joyce was the first artist to make this explicit. By doing so he applied the principles of electronics to the whole of history and culture.[15]
In his contribution to the following issue of Explorations, in an article appropriately titled “The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho,” in July 1956, McLuhan makes another, more limited but much more revealing use of terms associated with electricity. Here he writes apropos of the electrification of writing by the telegraph: “The telegraph translates writing into sound. The electrification of writing was almost as big a step back towards the acoustic world as those steps since taken by telephone, radio, T.V.”[16] Interestingly, according to McLuhan editor and biographer W. Terrence Gordon, “this essay is [also McLuhan’s] first to be marked throughout by the questing style of writing that he referred to as his probes.”[17]
Hence, even though electric terminology only makes a more assured and auspicious entry in 1958, in two papers revealingly titled “Our New Electronic Culture”[18] and “The Electronic Revolution in North America,”[19] where McLuhan plainly states that “we have moved beyond mechanisation into the electronic age,”[20] it seems that the shift in McLuhan’s thinking about the history of communication had happened earlier, somewhere between mid-1955 and mid-1956.
But perhaps we can narrow it down even more. In a short text published in the fall 1955 issue of the university periodical Shenandoah—but most likely written earlier that year—McLuhan seemed to be still holding fast to his continuous and mechanical views of the evolution of media:
The mechanization of writing mechanized the visual-acoustic metaphor on which all civilization rests; it created the classroom and mass education, the modern pressand telegraph. It was the original assembly line. […] Telephone, gramophone, and radio are the mechanization of post-literate acoustic space. […] Movies and TV complete the cycle of mechanization of the human sensorium.[21]
Interestingly, however, in another paper published that very same fall, in November of 1955, McLuhan seems to be taking his “first step beyond” the mechanized view of the history of new media:
Today we are, in a technical if not literary sense, probably post-literate. Literacy would now appear as a 5000-year phase between pre-literate society and ourselves. Between the invention of printing from movable type and the achievement of television, technology produces a graduated series of mechanical steps toward the complete mechanization of the human sensorium. But television, the last step, may well be a step beyond mechanization. Television may be as decisively the successor to writing as oral speech was the predecessor of writing.[22]
This first electrical step (still pertaining only to television at that point) was very soon to be followed—as I have discovered through archival research in the McLuhan Fonds in Ottawa—by a giant leap when McLuhan, in an address entitled “Educational Effects of the Mass Media of Communication” published in March 1956[23] but delivered on November 21, 1955, clearly states that the “telegraph was not just an extension of print. It is not the mechanization of writing but the electrification of writing.”[24]
Moreover, in this same talk, soon after this statement, McLuhan radically rearranges his previously mechanistic and continuous view of the history of media:
The order in which these changes occurred chronologically is not entirely their technological order of development. Technically, the telegraph was far in advance of the movie or writing with moving images. And the telephone is in advance of the gramaphone (sic) technically because the gramaphone (sic) is merely the mechanization of speech and sound, whereas the telephone is the electrification of speech, as the telegraph was the electrification of writing.[25]
According to this new, electrified, McLuhan, “[w]e have moved far beyond mechanization. Let us not lose ourselves by supposing that we have merely to contend with new forms of mechanization.”[26] He even mentions, for what is, to my knowledge, the first time, the proverbial “electronic age”[27] that would soon become his trademark. This occurs in a statement about nature imitating art and, again, on the next page, in another statement about the current state of education: “If education has now become the basic investment and activity of the electronic age, then the class-room educator can recover his role only by enlarging it beyond anything it ever was in any previous culture.”[28] This is the McLuhan we know.
Thus it seems that the electric illumination of McLuhan’s mind took place in the last months of 1955, somewhere, I would argue, between September and November of that year. But how McLuhan himself came to see things under this new (electric) light, for what reasons and under what influences, is not so easy to determine. Even though, as we have seen, McLuhan later openly admitted that he had radically changed his perspective on this issue, he did not himself publicly identify the cause(s) or source(s) of this apparently quite sudden enlightenment.
Potential and kinetic source(s) of electrical conversion
Kindly responding to my early inquiries on this subject a few years ago, Marshall McLuhan’s late son, Eric, surmised that the methodological influence of Practical Criticism—source of the New Criticism of I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, with whom McLuhan studied while pursuing his Ph.D. at Cambridge—could have spurred his interest first in popular culture, then in electronic media.[29] However, it seemed to me that the concern for popular culture and new media, already present in The Mechanical Bride and other publications of the late forties and early fifties, could not fully explain the change in terminology and historical perspective signalled by the sudden irruption of the more specific notion of the “electric age” in late 1955. Of course, Eric McLuhan was very young in those days and most likely unaware of the precise nature of his father’s work, albeit it seems the 13-year-old McLuhan would himself soon be actively probing the world of electronics.[30]
One can also consider the possible contributing role of historical context: perhaps the fact that the Mechanical Bride (the automobile) was being replaced as the defining technological invention at the time by the Electronic Bride (television) played an important role. The widening influence of television in Canada in the mid-fifties (the CBC started transmitting in 1952 in Montréal and Toronto), and its more advanced state in the neighbouring United States, certainly could have made the electronic age increasingly “visible” to McLuhan. The production of the first technologically and commercially viable transistor in the mid-fifties, following work at Bell Labs, also seems very timely. But to my knowledge, these technological developments have never been explicitly identified as revelatory by McLuhan himself, though the 1955 quote about the invention of television possibly being “a step beyond mechanization” could lead us to believe that the spread of this new electronic media might have played at least a contextual or preparatory role for the full-blown electrical conversion that would soon follow.
Another contextual factor might be considered here: the very location and discussions of the lively group of scholars, artists and friends that had started to assemble in Toronto at that time. At least, this is what McLuhan’s friend and Explorations co-editor, Ted Carpenter, suggests[AN1] :
Let’s start with Toronto, where it all began. Even into the 1950s, the city remained a depressing place… Then, suddenly, refugees appeared, different hued, many tongued, talented, hungry, including BBC directors looking for work, Hollywood writers fleeing McCarthy. In 1950, CBC-Radio spun off a competitor, CBC-TV. Magnetic tape broke recording monopolies. LPs filled the air with African drums, Medieval music, Black humor, anything. … Even the university showed signs of life. … All this was also happening elsewhere in North America, but with one difference: from Toronto, you could see it happening. It was like living on an island, studying the mainland. You saw the whole show. Its main event was the electronic revolution. The local blackout highlighted that distant glow.[31]
This metaphorical description of the privileged perspective granted by Toronto, however interesting and evocative, remains somewhat general and vague. When exactly in the fifties did this electronic revolution become visible to them? Why was the islander McLuhan the first to see this distant glow on the mainland?
Being a literary scholar by profession, I could not help but think that some author or direct intellectual influence could have played a greater role in McLuhan’s electronic awakening. There must have been a “source,” I thought. Unfortunately (for me), McLuhan read innumerable books and was in contact with numerous authors and intellectuals. Where to start then?
At the time of my talk at the McLuhan 100 · Then | Now | Next conference in 2011, I had narrowed the possibilities down to what I then considered to be the three most likely “suspects” that could have played a defining role in McLuhan’s electrical conversion: the Irish writer James Joyce, the American philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford and the French geologist and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Joyce was a potential suspect, among other reasons, because of the previously quoted passage where McLuhan makes his first use of electric terminology and because of McLuhan’s intense interest in Joyce’s writings at the time.[32] Yet word searches of “electric,” “electricity” and “electronic” through digital editions of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake did not yield any earth-shattering results. Nowhere did I find any explicit references to a “new electric or electronic age,” save in one interesting but fleeting passage of the [AN2] Wake where King Roderick O’Conor is referred to as the “last preelectric king of Ireland.”[33]
As is suggested by the earlier quote about Joyce, where McLuhan compared his literary technique to the cathode circuit, the author himself—like the advent of television—may perhaps have played more of a contextual or catalytic role in McLuhan’s electrical “epiphany,” while also being a literary model for McLuhan’s own developing mosaic or electric style (alongside other literary and poetic models such as Pound, Lewis and Elliot).
Indeed, Joyce would soon become the literary embodiment of this new “electric culture” for McLuhan. Already in 1957, for instance, in a book review of Joycean secondary literature for the journal Renascence, he wrote that: “Like Pound and Eliot, Joyce assumed that verbal art in the electronic age had to assume the responsibility of precision and power equivalent to the physical sciences.”[34] Later, in 1961, in another Renascence book review entitled “The Electric Culture,” Joyce is said to “assimilate… the whole of our new electric culture to traditional book culture in a great paradigm verbivoco visual culture.”[35]
Thus, to use mcluhanesque parlance, the fascination of McLuhan for James Joyce could perhaps be seen as an important element of the ground on which the figure of the electric age suddenly emerged in the mid-fifties, but may not have been the spark that ignited his new view of the history of technology.
My second suspect, Lewis Mumford, is a true philosopher of technology. Indeed, as Philipp Marchand, among others, noted, Mumford, as early as 1934 in his book Technics and Civilization, had already “posited a radical distinction between the first stage of industrial civilization, based on steam power and highly mechanical in character, and a second stage based on electricity and organic in nature.”[36] James Carey also noted that McLuhan had “ideological precursors of his arguments in the work of scholars earlier in the century who argued for the capacity of electricity to act as a midwife to a new society,”[37] the foremost among these being Mumford, who had even “anticipated McLuhan’s arguments”:[38] “Mumford based his important work… on [Patrick] Gedde’s distinction between the paleotechnic (steam and mechanics) and neotechnic (electricity) phases of industry and communication”[39] and this early Mumford “shared” with McLuhan, Carey remarks, “the view that neotechnic restores the organic and aesthetic.”[40]
In fact, Mumford himself, in the second volume of The Myth and the Machine, The Pentagon of Power first published in 1964, reminds his readers of his precedence over McLuhan on these matters by quoting his previous work:
Now, electronic communication has obviously added a new dimension to human capability and practical cooperation: this is a platitude of nineteenth-century thought that McLuhan has sought to turn into a startling private paradox. … On this matter, I have no hesitation in putting forward the views expressed in ‘Technics and Civilization’ (1934), at a time when television was still in the experimental stage. In my interpretation of neotechnics I said: “With the invention of the telegraph a series of inventions began to bridge the gap in time between communication and response despite the handicaps of space: first the telegraph, then the telephone, then the wireless telegraph, then the wireless telephone, and finally television. As a result, communication is now on the point of returning, with the aid of mechanical devices, to that instantaneous reaction of person to person with which it began…”[41]
Mumford goes on to emphasize that these “pages diminish… the claims of priority and peculiar insight often made for McLuhan as the unique prophet of the Electronic Age –thirty years later.”[42] Could this mean that McLuhan had used Mumford’s ideas without attribution?
At the time of the McLuhan 100th anniversary conference, I had rejected this possibility as unlikely. Beyond the fact that Mumford’s vision of electricity still seemed partly embroiled with elements of mechanics, other factors made such an accusation difficult to substantiate, I thought.
It seemed odd, for example, that while McLuhan, according to Marchand,[43] read Mumford while still in St. Louis in the early forties, he did not himself adopt a similar discontinuous view of the shift from the mechanistic to the electric age until many years later, when in Toronto in 1955. Why would the passages about the neotechnic and the paleotechnic from the 1934 edition of Technics and Civilization have had an effect only 15 or 20 years later? Why would McLuhan have maintained his continuous view of the transition from the mechanistic to the electronic era for so many years? Had he really read Mumford’s book in the forties?
At the time of the conference, I had also noted that, although McLuhan quoted Mumford once in The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962 and 14 times in Understanding Media, it was always in relation to his work on architecture (Sticks and Stones, 1924) or on the The City in History (1961), and not regarding the 1934 theories of Technics and Civilization. The latter was not even listed in the bibliography of The Gutenberg Galaxy and was mentioned only once in Understanding Media (in relation to the invention of the wheel).[44]
Moreover, as editor of Understanding Media,W. Terrence Gordon wrote in his introduction to the second chapter that, even though “there are many references to the writings of Lewis Mumford… as often as not, Mumford serves McLuhan as a negative model for media analysis.”[45] Finally, I had noted that, while Mumford might have had similar views to McLuhan in the thirties, he would later follow, as James Carey notes, an “intellectual evolution in precisely the opposite direction,” since he later “changed from an electrical optimist to a soured prophet of doom.”[46]
I must now admit, however, that I am no longer so certain that Mumford’s ideas did not play a more important role in McLuhan’s electrical conversion. Indeed, a close look at the 1934 edition of Technics and Civilization that belonged to McLuhan’s personal library, now available at the Fisher Library,[47] proves that McLuhan was intimately familiar with Mumford’s use of Geddes’ ideas on the passage from the paleotechnic (mechanic) to the more organic neotechnic (electric) age, even if, to my knowledge, he never credits Mumford or Geddes for these ideas anywhere in his own writings.
One notes, firstly, that most of the annotations in the margins and elements in the indexes were written with a pencil, while others were inscribed with a pen (in blue ink). There are a few places where the ink traces over the pencilled writing as if to make it more legible. Thus, it seems that the book was read at least twice and at different times.[48] On the inside cover page, one finds the words “Culture and Communication Seminar” (in blue ink) barely readable under a postal sticker with the following information: “H. M. McLuhan, 29 Wells Hill Ave., Toronto 10, Ontario.” Based on the year the seminar began (1952-53) and the fact that McLuhan moved to this address in 1955, this could indicate that Mumford’s book was in a collection or reading list used for the seminar at the University of Toronto, before it became part of McLuhan’s personal library in his home.
More importantly for our argument here, on page 221, where Mumford begins to discuss the “neotechnic phase,” going on to mention the first theories and experiments eventually leading to the mastery of electricity in the 19th century, one finds the words “misses point” pencilled in in the margins by McLuhan vis-à-vis the following sentence: “The neotechnic phase was marked, to begin with, by the conquest of a new form of energy: electricity.”[49] It is not clear what “point” exactly is missed by Mumford here,[50] but this certainly proves that McLuhan—even if he did not share Mumford’s views on some aspects of the transition from the mechanic to the electric—was certainly familiar with these views already in his first reading of the book.
Even though it remains impossible to confirm when exactly McLuhan made these notes,[51] given that he had been familiar with Mumford for many years (he even invited him, unsuccessfully, to speak at the University of Toronto as early as 1948[52]), and given that the book was published in 1934, was heavily annotated in at least two different instances[AN3] and seems to have been part of a collection for the Culture and Communication Seminar in the early fifties before being integrated into McLuhan’s personal home library in the mid-fifties, it seems highly likely that at least one of the readings of Technics and Civilization predates McLuhan’s 1955 electrical conversion. Of course, this does not prove that Mumford’s book could have been the source of, or provided the spark for, this “conversion,” but it does prove that McLuhan was well aware of Mumford’s Geddes-inspired ideas on the shift from the mechanic to the electric by that time.
In fact, at the time of my 2011 presentation, I was convinced that my third suspect, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin,[53] was a more likely culprit as a direct source of McLuhan’s electrical illumination of the fall of 1955 (that is, if there was one such source). Indeed, it just so happens that Teilhard’s Le Phénomène humain was published for the first time precisely in the fall of 1955.
And it also so happens that this first volume of Teilhard’s copious speculative oeuvre includes the well-known passage that McLuhan quotes in The Gutenberg Galaxy and in many other articles of the early sixties, and again in Understanding Media: that is, the passage where the French Jesuit highlights “the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves” (le “prodigieux événement biologique représenté par la découverte des ondes électromagnétiques”[54]), a crucial sentence drawing immediate attention to the radical change of paradigm brought about by electricity.
In a 1961 article, “The Humanities in the Electronic Age,” McLuhan openly credits Teilhard—despite the possible “weaknesses” of his work, he adds—with “having correctly defined the major change of our age”[55]—namely, the discovery of electromagnetic waves. In a 1962 article (“The Electric Age: The Age of Implosion”), he writes even more blatantly that “De Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man may not have been the first to observe the heart of this matter, but so far as I know he was the first to state it,” going on to quote the previous passage and adding at the end that “the crux” here is “to have perceived ‘the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electronic waves’.”[56]
The problem, for the sake of my argument here, is that Teilhard’s The Human Phenomenon was only translated into English in 1959. Could McLuhan have read this crucial statement as early as the fall of 1955, even though he does not openly quote Teilhard until after the publication of the 1959 English edition? While some evidence may seem to point in this direction, it remains impossible to prove.
To be sure, McLuhan was aware of Teilhard’s work well before the publication of Le Phénomène humain in 1955, since his student and friend, Walter Ong, who had met Teilhard in Paris in 1950,[57] explicitly refers to Teilhard and to his concept of the “noosphère” in his lengthy review of McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride for the journal Social Order in 1952.[58] Furthermore, even though he was forbidden by the Church from publishing any non-scientific material during his lifetime, it seems that Teilhard’s more speculative work had been circulating widely in samizdat form within Catholic circles for many years. These “clandestins,” as Teilhard himself termed them, were mimeographed and distributed extensively in Catholic intellectual circles, as was most likely the case at St. Michaels College.[59]
McLuhan’s son Eric wrote to me that he could “not advise as to when or how [his father] read Teilhard” in French, but he did confirm that, while his father was not fluent in French, he had a “good reading knowledge” of it.[60] McLuhan scholar Andrew Chrystal did write me that Donald Theall, McLuhan’s doctoral student in the 1950s, “mentioned that he and McLuhan read Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man when it first came out in 1955,”[61] but this testimony remains impossible to prove, since Andrew has unfortunately not kept the email in which Theall made this statement. Donald Theall himself is deceased, as are Ted Carpenter, Dorothy Lee, Tom Easterbrook and most of the other possible contemporary “witnesses” of that time, so it remains impossible, at least for now, to prove without a doubt that McLuhan read Teilhard in French at the time of its publication.
Eric McLuhan, who was 13 in 1955, says he “never saw a copy of Teilhard in French in the office or in the house.”[62] And McLuhan’s personal working library at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library does not include the French edition of Le phénomène humain. It does, however, include a copy of the 1959 English translation, which attests to its importance for McLuhan. The book is closely annotated and indexed, just as was Mumford’s Technics and Civilization.
Inside the book, one finds a loose sheet of paper with a single typed quote: the famous passage where de Chardin identifies “the discovery of electro-magnetic waves” as a “prodigious biological event.” It is the only such quote typed out and isolated on a separate piece of paper. The page number (240) of this quote is the only number that is emphatically framed in McLuhan’s self-made index of the front cover pages, while the same number is followed in the index of the back cover pages by the abbreviated words: “Electro-mag = biolog event.” The quote itself, inside the book on page 240, is bracketed and the words “prodigious biological event” and “electro-magnetic waves” are underlined. One also finds page numbers in the margin (referring to other pages related to this same question). More importantly, however, at the bottom of this very same page, one finds the following words:
“Mumford Tech + Civ / electric = organic.”[63]
This annotation most likely dates from the early months of 1960, since, as we have seen earlier, this copy was given to McLuhan in January of that year and the highlighted quote on this page will very soon make its way into The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, and many of McLuhan’s later publications. Hence it seems obvious that, at that point at the very latest, McLuhan knew that Mumford, following Geddes, had connected the electric with the organic, even though, as we have seen earlier, he never openly credits Mumford for this anywhere in his work.
Could McLuhan have observed the same “discretion” regarding his reading of Teilhard in French in 1955 and only have started to openly quote him after the publication of The Human Phenomenon in English in 1959? Due to McLuhan’s unheralded use of Mumford’s ideas on the advent of electricity, it is tempting, regarding Teilhard also, to believe Ted Carpenter’s answer to the question of whether his friend’s peculiar non-linear “anti-book” methods produced any insights: “Of course. But not the ones for which he’s best known. Those were obtained by others, employing conventional, historical, literate, Western methods.”[64]
Postliterate postscript: Beyond the epiphany
The same Carpenter—talking here about the origins of the “Toronto School of Communications”—provides another possible way of looking at these issues:
This business of who-took-what-from-whom misses the point. In one of his last essays, Eric Havelock, who left Toronto in 1947, suggested that the so-called Toronto School of Communications started with a phrase he used in a lecture possibly attended by Innis. From Innis this went to McLuhan and from there to the world. Nonsense. This wasn’t a torch race. It was a light show.[65]
The electrical conversion of Marshall McLuhan seems to have been part (and parcel) of that light show. Hence, it would most certainly be presumptuous and overly simplistic, as Carpenter eloquently states, to identify a single (or even only two) source(s) for such a major change of perspective.
This must explain why, in my quest for the source of McLuhan’s electric conversion, I have felt more and more like McLuhan’s specialist “who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.” My previous hypotheses are, of course, embarrassingly anti-mcluhanesque: this search for a decisive influence is typical of what the Germans call Quellenforschung, the antiquated philological search for sources, which is, of course, typically literary, linear and based on a print-oriented belief in the “efficient causes” that, according to McLuhan, only create the illusion of causal explanation by their sequential and temporal order.
McLuhan was indeed more concerned with “formal causes.” Thus, it is very likely that his own electrical conversion could have been the result of a more complex pattern of factors coalescing in the mid-fifties when the Holy Trinity of Joyce, Teilhard and Mumford happened to be centre stage at the very moment that the biggest “step yet beyond mechanization” so far—television—was changing the whole set, and the transistor, which would be the foundation of the next phase of the electronic (digital) age, was being invented.
In fact, McLuhan’s quote regarding this step beyond mechanization in the June 1955 issue of Explorations implies that he himself might have made a first step in the direction of opposing the electric to the mechanic earlier in 1955 and that there was perhaps no sudden “epiphany” in the fall. His intensive reading of Joyce’s electric prose at the time, reminiscences of Mumford’s Geddes-inspired paleotechnic and neotechnic eras and perhaps even direct or indirect echoes of Teilhard’s first posthumous speculative work published in French could all have combined to form the pattern and ground that became, in the fall of 1955, a true light show, the electrified the McLuhan that we now know.
Indeed, McLuhan himself, reacting in a private letter to Donald Theall about his ex-student’s ambiguous and somewhat critical book about him, explains that the search for “academic authority” might not apply to his process of discovery:
As for the book in general, Don I think you take me too “seriously.” It is really more fun to join the quest for discoveries than to try to classify and evaluate the processes in which I am involved. You are, in a sense, trying to translate me into an academic fixture. Perhaps that is what I mean by “serious.” On page 222 you refer to my retaining Joyce as my major authority. Please consider that there can be no “authority” where the game is discovery.[66]
Guilty as charged. While I thought, throughout this investigation, that I was the modern sleuth on the path to discovering the source of Marshall McLuhan’s electrical conversion, I was perhaps taking myself too seriously, becoming myself a laughable “academic fixture” in search of “authority.” If I am to truly participate in the game of discovery, I am perhaps in serious need of some electrifying thoughts. Any ideas?
An afterthought on the McLuhan-Mumford electrical enigma
In what should have been the final version of this article, had the original volume it was destined for been published, I had ended on the previous self-critical musings about the narrow and linear perspective of my obsessive search for the source(s) of Marshall McLuhan’s electrical conversion, hoping that other critics could someday provide a more complete and accurate view of this major turning point of the mid-1950s in McLuhan’s intellectual trajectory.
Many years later, as I came back to this text in view of finally publishing it, I could not help but wonder once again about the obfuscation of Mumford as a source of influence on the electrical conversion of McLuhan. Why did McLuhan not acknowledge Mumford-Geddes’s earlier ideas on the more organic electric era anywhere in his work even if he was highly familiar with them, having read Technics and Civilization very closely at least twice, it seems. Mumford publicly denounced McLuhan for this “omission” but, to my knowledge, McLuhan never publicly responded to these accusations.
Thanks to Marshall McLuhan’s grandson, Andrew McLuhan, I have now become aware of an unpublished—and untitled—17-page essay (dated February 28, 1973[67]) in which McLuhan does provide an indirect but very frank reply to Mumford, which might help us shed light on the issue of their perplexing intellectual relationship.
McLuhan does not here mention the Mumfordian antecedence of the distinction between the mechanical and electrical eras, but he does offer a thorough critical reading of his views on these issues, highlighting the very different “perspectives” they had on the new electric era, and on the very idea of change and transformation in the history of media and technologies.
McLuhan starts by recognizing the “debt” he “incurred” to Mumford, which he says he is “happy to acknowledge by telling of the enthusiasm [he] both found and enjoyed in his writing.” However, he refers here only to The Culture of Cities (1938), which he praises highly,[68] never mentioning the earlier Technics and Civilization (1933), which is not referred to even once in this 17-page text.[69]
After this brief praise of Mumford’s work in the incipit, McLuhan states that he has only recently “discovered the great lack of enthusiasm which Dr. Mumford feels for [his] own work”:
Indeed, I have been embarrassed to note that the degree of Dr. Mumford’s misunderstanding of me is only exceeded by his hostility towards the opinions with which he endows me, opinions which I, too, would consider abhorrent in anybody.[70]
He then goes on to explain his ideas in more detail, and to offer his—very critical—reading of Mumford’s own work. It would be tedious to expose here the detailed arguments in this lengthy reply, but this quote from page 4 perhaps summarizes neatly what McLuhan finds problematic in Mumford’s perspective:
Dr. Mumford has special need to understand the nature of visual space since he, like many others, is an unwitting prisoner of its modalities [….] Thus it is this unconscious visual bias that betrays him into a pervasive habit of moral quantification, a habit of adding up the losses and gains of historical development with a fervor of moral arithmetic that equals that of any Benthamite. His omnipresent visual orientation starkly isolates Dr. Mumford’s central problem which is this: he has no theory of communication or change. It may seem paradoxical that a man who has spent many years describing change should lack the means of explaining it.[71]
In other words, Munford is accused of “attacking the visual culture of the Sun God of the Renaissance” while remaining himself “a visually-oriented man who is unaware of the peculiar and ineluctable modalities of the visual”[72] and thus incapable of understanding the major (acoustic) metamorphosis brought about by electronic communication technologies.
More than once, McLuhan highlights Munford’s lack of understanding—and even of the means of understanding—technological change: “Dr. Mumford has no theory of communication or change and employs the conventional and merely external means of toting up losses and gains that accrue from innovation.”[73] He even concludes his essay by hammering once again that “Dr. Mumford’s lack of a theory of communication thus deprives him of any means of evaluing (sic) change except in the most vaguely moralistic and descriptive terms.”[74]
Concurrently with these attacks, McLuhan accuses Mumford of misunderstanding his own views rooted in understanding:
Dr. Mumford has totally misread my supposed scorn or enthusiasm for any or all of the technics of human history. I find satisfaction in understanding the many intelligible relations and unexpected forms that the physical extensions of our own physical beings have involved us in. But I regard understanding as creating an available means of liberation and deliverance rather than as commitment. Awareness of the sensory and perceptual effects of diverse technologies can make possible a humane and modest existence for those who seek it.[75]
More importantly, the religious roots of this well-known value that McLuhan confers to understanding—over “judging”—technologies are then clarified in an unusually candid[76] passage about his faith:
I know of no way to indict the whole secular world. As a Christian, I share a faith that deters me from trusting or judging a world that has already been judged. As a member of our displaced Western culture, I yet cherish its altogether fragile and evanescent values, and I study and recognize the quite different values of Oriental and other cultures, realizing the quite special advantages of living in this present time when the wired planet presents us a magnetic city of instantly transportable and disembodied “spirits”. [….] They can be, and are daily, in many parts of the world simultaneously. Discarnate man has replaced the “incarnate devils” who perpetrated the scientific and mechanical world of Dr. Mumford’s Sun God.”[77]
Here it seems, the “lines,” if I may so, are drawn quite clearly between the very different understandings of McLuhan and Mumford on these issues. Was this text meant as a direct answer to Mumford’s accusations? Did McLuhan seriously consider publishing it? Why was it not published in the end? Why does McLuhan still not refer anywhere in this text to Technics and Civilization?
I have no answer to these questions, but this unpublished essay does shed some light on the fundamental—epistemological, ontological, and even theological—ways in which Marshall McLuhan wanted to distinguish himself from Lewis Mumford. It might also explain why McLuhan never confronted Mumford directly for “missing the point” about the underlying meaning of the advent of the electrical era.
[1] Jean-François Vallée, “Marshall McLuhan, the First Electric Intellectual?”, China Media Research, 19:3 (July 2023): 19–37. A first version of this article was originally published in French: “L’image globale : la pensée électrique de Marshall McLuhan,” in L’ère électrique/Electric Age, ed.Silvestra Mariniello, Andrea Oberhuber and Olivier Asselin (Ottawa, Ottawa University Press, 2011), 85–112. The English of the first article was revised by Brian Neville. This new article was revised by my wife Andrea Neuhofer.
[2] Jane Howard, “Oracle of the Electric Age,” Life Magazine (February 1966): 91–99.
[3] James Carey, “Marshall McLuhan: Genealogy and Legacy,” Canadian Journal of Communication 23, 3 (March 1998) https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.1998v23n3a1045; accessed 16 January 2025.
[4] Kathleen Nott, Observer (7 August 1966).
[5] McLuhan’s name appeared alongside those of contributors and employees in the magazine’s masthead. The January 1996 issue (titled “Channelling McLuhan”) has several articles on McLuhan, including Gary Wolf’s “The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool,” Wired 4:01 (January 1996): 122–127.
[6] Marshall McLuhan, “New Media as Political Forms,” Explorations 3 (August 1954): 120–126. Reprinted in Marshall McLuhan, McLuhan Unbound, ed. Eric McLuhan and W. Terence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA.: Gingko Press, 2005), #14, 11. Emphasis added.
[7] Marshall McLuhan, “Electronic Evolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media,” Understanding Me. Lectures and Inteviews, ed. Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 2003), 7.
[8] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003 [1964]), 255.
[9] McLuhan even stigmatized his late colleague and purported mentor Harold Innis’s “blindness” on this issue in his introduction to the 1964 paperback edition of The Bias of Communication: “A good example of […] technological blindness in Innis himself was his mistake of regarding radio and electrical technology as a further extension of the patterns of mechanical technology […] Had he not been hypnotized by his respect for the pervasive conventional view on this question, Innis could have worked out the new electric pattern of culture quite easily.” Marshall McLuhan, “Introduction,” in H. A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964 [1951]), xii.
[10] Marshall McLuhan, “Myth and Mass Media,” Daedelus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 88:2 (1959): 339-48. Reprinted in McLuhan and Gordon, McLuhan Unbound, 16–17.
[11] According to his son, Eric, McLuhan briefly considered differentiating between the terms, before finally deciding against it. The two terms are used interchangeably in his writings. Eric McLuhan, Private email, 4 October 2005.
[12] One exception is Cameron McEwen’s hypothesis about what he calls McLuhan’s “second conversion,” the abandonment by the latter of his previous moralistic literary “point of view” for the more relativistic and non-judgmental position of the “student.” McEwen situates this second conversion somewhere between 1946 and 1951. During this period however, as we have just shown, McLuhan still posits a continuous relationship between the mechanistic and electronic eras. This second—methodological and moral—conversion described by McEwen could, however, be seen in many ways as laying the ground for the electrical-intellectual conversion that we are exploring here (which could then perhaps be considered to be McLuhan’s third conversion). Cameron McEwen, “McLuhan’s second conversion,” McLuhan’s New Sciences (November 18, 2015)
https://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2015/11/mcluhans-2nd-conversion/; accessed 29 July 2024.
[13] Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (New York: Atlas, 2010), 128. Emphasis added.
[14] A first version of this paper was supposed to be included in a publication stemming from the proceedings of this conference. However, this publication (for University of Toronto Press) never saw the light.
[15] Marshall McLuhan, “Radio and Television vs. the ABCDE-Minded: Radio and T.V. in Finnegan’s Wake,” Explorations 5 (June 1955): 12–18.
[16] Marshall McLuhan, “The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho,” Explorations 6 (July 1956): 15–21. Reprinted in McLuhan and Gordon, 13.
[17] Gordon, McLuhan Unbound, 2.
[18] This talk was given before the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and published subsequently in its journal. Marshall McLuhan, “Our New Electronic Culture: The Role of Mass Communications in Meeting Today’s Problems,” National Association of Educational Broadcasters Journal (October 1958): 19–20, 24–26.
[19] Marshall McLuhan, “The Electronic Revolution in North America,” in International Literary Annual 1, ed. John Wain (New York, Criterion Books, 1958), 165–169.
[20] McLuhan, “The Electronic Revolution in North America,” 165.
[21] Marshall McLuhan, “Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath,” Shenandoah VII, 1 (Autumn 1955): 51.
[22] Marshall McLuhan, “A Historical Approach to the Media,” Teachers College Record 57, 2 (November 1955): 107. Emphasis added.
[23] This address was given on the occasion of the inauguration of Hollis L. Caswell as President of Teachers College at Columbia University. It was published in an edited version in March 1956. Marshall McLuhan, “Educational Effects of Mass-Media of Communication,” Teachers College Review 20, 4 (March 1956): 566-75.
[24] Marshall McLuhan, “Educational Effects of the Mass Media of Communication,” Marshall McLuhan Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, Typescript, 4. Emphasis added.
[25] McLuhan, “Educational Effects…”: 4.
[26] McLuhan, “Educational Effects…”: 7.
[27] McLuhan, “Educational Effects…”: 8.
[28] McLuhan, “Educational Effects…”: 9.
[29] Eric McLuhan’s message to me reads in full: “Well, I found a reference—perhaps the first—in an item in Explorations Eight (October, 1957). ‘Item 14’ is entitled ‘The new art or science which the electronic / or post-mechanical age has to invent / concerns the alchemy of social change.’ The ideas, though, had been developing apace in his pieces for all of the Explorations issues, beginning with ‘Culture without Literacy’ in Explorations One.” Private email, 8 October 2005.
[30] It seems indeed that the young Eric McLuhan was starting to do his own electrical probes at this very time according to his father: “Eric is 14. His interests are slightly musical, a bit more theatrical, and intensely electronic. He is very much the radio and electrical fanatic just now.” Marshall McLuhan, “Letter to Wyndham Lewis,” 12 August 1956, Marshall McLuhan Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, Letters 1952–1957, Vol. 225, File 4.
[31] Ted Carpenter, “That Not-So-Silent Sea” (Appendix B), in Donald F. Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 250–251. Emphasis added.
[32] On the prophetic nature of Joyce’s reflections on electricity (and their impact on McLuhan), see especially Donald F. Theall, “Beyond the Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace,” Postmodern Culture 2, 3 (May 1992).
[33] James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 380.11-17. Eric McLuhan discusses this passage in his book, based on his doctoral dissertation, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 154.
[34] Marshall McLuhan, “Compliment Accepted: Review of Six Books on James Joyce,” Renascence 10.2 (1957): 107.
[35] Marshall McLuhan, “The Electric Culture: The Books at the Wake,” Renascence 13.4 (1961): 219-20.
[36] Philipp Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (Toronto: Random House, 1989), 69.
[37] James Carey, “The Roots of Modern Media Analysis: Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan,” [1980] James Carey. A Critical Reader, ed. Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 42.
[38] Carey, 42.
[39] Carey, 47.
[40] Carey, 53.
[41] Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970), 295.
[42] Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 296.
[43] Marchand, 69. Marchand does not, however, provide any reference or proof for this assertion in his biography. The first reference to Mumford in McLuhan’s “published” letters is in a letter to Felix Giovanelli dated the 10th of May 1946. Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (Toronto: Oxford University Press), 184.
[44] McLuhan, Understanding Media, 247.
[45] W. Terrence Gordon, Understanding Media, 38. Emphasis added.
[46] James Carey, “The Roots of Modern Media Analysis,” 42.
[47] This collection of some 6,000 books was donated in 2013 by his son Eric McLuhan to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. I am indebted and extremely grateful to Dominique Scheffel-Dunand and Christopher Young for giving me privileged access to these precious documents in the fall of 2013 before they were catalogued and made publicly available at the Fisher Library.
[48] This is confirmed by Eric McLuhan’s response to my enquiries about these annotations: “Dad usually made his in pencil, but if they faded or were too faint after a while, he would go over them again in pen. They were done at different times. He would frequently return to a book like Mumford’s and read passages again and make new use of them in his own writing.” Eric McLuhan, Private email, 31 October 2013.
[49] Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934.
[50] Perhaps the fact that Mumford goes on to discuss an abstract treatise on magnetism from the 17th century and other books or experiments that prefigured the true irruption of electromagnetic technology in the 19th century? McLuhan’s first mention of Mumford in his published correspondence in the previously mentioned 1946 letter to Felix Giovanelli might give us some clues: he calls Mumford “the urbanite” whose “abstract assertion” on the possibility of the “renewal in human condition” in the face of technology is opposed, by McLuhan, to “the quiet cultivation of a positive grammatica” found in Poe and Faulkner. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 184. Much later, in a 1971 letter to William Jovanovich, McLuhan writes that Mumford is of the same “vintage” as the “fanatic left-winger” Jonathan Miller who also “cannot understand [him] at all.” Letters, 438.
[51] A pencil annotation in the margins of page 14, vis-à-vis a passage about the clock regulating the rhythm of medieval monasteries, reads “now electric tape” as if McLuhan was referring to the electromagnetic tape used for computers that will from “now” on regulate the rhythm of industry. It seems that the use of such electronic tape was not familiar until the early fifties.
[52] Indeed, McLuhan wrote directly to Mumford on December 28, 1948, inviting him to the University of Toronto for “informal chats with small faculty groups” (he mentions Innis, Easterbrook and Karl Helleiner in his letter). Marshall McLuhan, Letters, 208.
[53] It is important to specify here that, even though the whole concept of the electronic global village seen as an extension of our nervous system, as many have recognized (including McLuhan himself), also owes much, if not all, to Teilhard’s concept of the noosphère, I do not share Tom Wolfe’s assertions about McLuhan being a “closet Teilhardian.” This hypothesis does not stand up to the evidence, since McLuhan, as we have seen, does frequently and openly quote Teilhard, even after the Vatican monitum against Teilhard’s work of 1962, in his 1964 book, Understanding Media. Moreover, McLuhan, being a conservative Catholic, had an uneasy, indeed conflictual, relationship with the Jesuit’s work and theology as can be plainly seen in some blunt passages of his correspondence. He openly says, for example, that he “is not a fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The idea that anything is better because it comes later is surely borrowed from pre-electronic technologies.” (“Letter to Tom and Dorothy Easterbrook,” 3 March 1972, Marshall McLuhan Fonds), while in another letter that same year he states that “the idea of a Cosmic thrust in one direction […] is surely one of the lamest semantic fallacies ever bred by the word ‘evolution’. That development should have any direction at all is inconceivable except to the highly literate community” (“Letter to Frtiz Wilhemsen,” 28 January 1972, Marshall McLuhan Fonds).
[54] Here is the passage quoted by McLuhan in the original: “On l’a déjà fait bien des fois remarquer. Par découverte, hier, du chemin de fer, de l’automobile, de l’avion, l’influence physique de chaque homme, réduite jadis à quelques kilomètres, s’étend maintenant à des centaines de lieues. Bien mieux: grâce au prodigieux événement biologique représenté par la découverte des ondes électro‑magnétiques, chaque individu se trouve désormais (activement et passivement) simultanément présent à la totalité de la mer et des continents, coextensif à la Terre.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le phénomène humain (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955), 267-268.
[55] Marshall McLuhan, “The Humanities in the Electronic Age,” The Humanities Association Bulletin 34:1 (1961): 3–11. Reprinted in McLuhan and Gordon, 12.
[56] Marshall McLuhan, “The Electronic Age: The Age of Implosion,” in Mass Media in Canada, ed. John A. Irving (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1962), 180.
[57] On Ong’s relationship to Teilhard, see Thomas J. Farrell, “Pierre Teilhard, S J and Walter Ong, S J. Affinities of their Interests and Thought,” Teilhard Perspective 45.2 (Fall 2012), http://teilharddechardin.org/mm_uploads/TPFall2012.pdf; accessed 21 September 2013.
[58] Walter Ong, “The Mechanical Bride: Christen the Folklore of Industrial Man. Review article of The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. By Herbert Marshall McLuhan,” Social Order 2 (February 1952): 79–85. This review was revised and reprinted more than once: “Rpt., revised, as ‘In a Way, the Angels Have a Greater Social Problem than Even Industrialized Man.’ In McLuhan Hot and Cool: A Critical Symposium With a Rebuttal by McLuhan, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stern, 82–92. New York: Dial, Brahmin Books, 1967. Rpt. as ‘A Modern Sensibility’ in McLuhan Hot and Cool: A Primer for Understanding of McLuhan & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal by McLuhan, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stern, 106-16. Middlesex (England): Penguin Books Ltd, 1968. Rpt. (same revision) as ‘In a Way, the Angels Have a Greater Social Problem than Even Industrialized Man.’ In McLuhan Hot and Cool: A Critical Symposium With a Rebuttal by McLuhan, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stern, 92–101. New York: New American Library, Signet Books, 1969. Rpt. (same revision), in French, as “Il y a chez les anges un problème social plus grave que chez l’homme industriel” in Pour ou contre McLuhan, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stern, 79–88. Translated by G. Durand and Y. Pettilon. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969.” Walter J. Ong, S. J.: A Bibliography 1929–2006, Thomas M. Walsh, with the assistance of M. Kathleen Schroeder, July 18, 2006, Item 67, pages 16–17 of the unpaginated PDF, https://www.slu.edu/arts-and-sciences/ong-center/pdfs/ong-bibliography.pdf; accessed 15 January 2025.
[59] According to Tom Wolfe: “among intellectuals at St. Mike’s, as they called St. Michael’s College, there was a lively underground, a Jesuit Samizdat in Teilhard de Chardin manuscripts, especially after he moved to the United States in 1951.” Tom Wolfe, “Foreword,” in Understanding Me. Lectures and Interviews, ed. Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 2003), xviii. A translator of Teilhard, Arthur Gibson, was even teaching at St. Michael’s in the 1960s. I checked the stacks of the plentiful Kelly Library at St. Michaels and they do possess two copies of the original 1955 French edition of Le Phénomène humain. The first copy, however, has a stamp with the date “JAN 14 1961”, while the second copy has no date stamp.
[60] Eric McLuhan, Private email, 2 November 2011.
[61] Theall added, according to Chrystal, that “in many ways, McLuhan was impressed by the work and found in it reinforcement vis-à-vis the significance of the ‘electric.’” Andrew Chrystall, Private email, 25 May 2006. Emphasis added. Chrystall states that Theall made these comments in a private email entitled “Teilhard, McLuhan in the 1950s and more” on 22 February 2005. He could not, however, find the original copy of this message.
[62] Eric McLuhan, Private email, 31 October 2013.
[63] Handwritten note in Marshall McLuhan’s personal copy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 240.
[64] Ted Carpenter, “That Not-So-Silent Sea” (“Appendix B”), in Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 257. According to Carpenter, the main sources of these ideas were either dead (Innis), too private to want publicity (Dorothy Lee), had taken their own ideas from somebody else (Edward Hall) or didn’t care (Carpenter himself). Among these sources, the only one mentioned by Carpenter that was “upset” by this process of appropriation was Mumford.
[65] Ted Carpenter, “That Not-So-Silent Sea” (“Appendix B”), in Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 250.
[66] Marshall McLuhan, “Letter to Don Theall,” August 6 1970, Typescript, 1–2. Marshall McLuhan Fonds.
[67] A digital PDF version of this typescript was graciously sent to me by Marshall McLuhan’s grandson, Andrew McLuhan. The cover page of this transcript identifies it as being part of the “Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections,” at York University with the call number 1990-018/030 (287). Copyright at the bottom of the text is ascribed to McLuhan Associates Limited, 1973. Since it is untitled. Andrew McLuhan refers to it simply as “Reply to Mumford”. I shall use the same title here.
[68] “Years ago, when The Culture of Cities was new, I incurred a debt to Mumford which I am now happy to acknowledge by telling of the enthusiasm I both found and enjoyed in his writing. His own enthusiasm and generosity was only matched by the diversity and range of his interests, which he presented with the dash and verve of a Macaulay.” Marshall McLuhan, [Reply to Mumford], February 28, 1973, 1.
[69] Instead, McLuhan focuses mostly on Mumford’s then much more recent Pentagon of Power (1970), the previously quoted second volume of his Myth of the Machine where Mumford attacks McLuhan. The first volume was published three years earlier: Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. I: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1967).
[70] McLuhan, [Reply to Mumford], 1.
[71] McLuhan, [Reply to Mumford], 4.
[72] McLuhan, [Reply to Mumford], 2. McLuhan uses here his oft-quoted observation about fish knowing nothing about water. “This is not a value judgment,” he adds. McLuhan also distinguishes himself from Mumford and his visually oriented Sun God by associating himself with the father of quantum mechanics: “Dr. Mumford is both the exponent and declared enemy of the declasse Renaissance King of visual organization: Werner Heisenberg is equally the exponent of an avant garde (sic) version of audile-tactile electronic culture. Dr. Mumford is old hat, and Heisenberg is very new hat.” McLuhan, [Reply to Mumford], 6.
[73] McLuhan, [Reply to Mumford], 14–15.
[74] McLuhan, [Reply to Mumford], 17.
[75] McLuhan, [Reply to Mumford], 10.
[76] McLuhan was generally discreet about his faith in his scholarly and more popular publications. A series of works and talks devoted to his religious thoughts and beliefs were collected in 1999: Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan & Jacek Szlarek (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999). The four conversations with Pierre Babin are particularly illuminating on this subject. They were originally published in French: Marshall McLuhan & Pierre Babin, L’Église de demain. Autre homme, autre chrétien à l’âge électronique (Lyon: Chalet, 1977).
[77] McLuhan, [Reply to Mumford], 10.
[AN1]To avoid repetition with previous paragraph
[AN2]Why «the»?
[AN3]on at least two different pages??
